He lowered the phone. He did not immediately put it away. He stood holding it at his side, looking out at the airfield, at his own aircraft sitting patient at the gate with its cargo door up and a belt loader nuzzling its flank, and for a while โ Imani counted the seconds without meaning to, the old rivet trick running in reverse โ for a while Gerald Pierce looked like nothing more remarkable than a tired man in an expensive suit who had missed his flight.
Then he turned, and he looked at her.
Not past her, not through her, the way he had on the aircraft, when she had been an interruption standing in the aisle with a boarding pass. At her. Four seats away across the worn gate carpet, with her backpack between her feet and her championship folder squared on her lap, he looked at Imani Brooks as if she had only just become a person in the story โ as if the story, which he had believed all morning to be his story, a small annoying administrative story about a delayed chairman, had quietly been somebody else's all along.
His mouth opened. Nothing came out of it. Imani had won debate rounds on less hesitation than that; she had been taught that the pause was where the truth stood up. But this was not a round, and nobody was scoring, and the man looking at her across Gate A17 was not preparing a rebuttal. She could see him assembling, piece by piece, a question he had clearly never in his life had to ask about his own name โ and finding, perhaps for the first time, that he did not know what his name had been used to do.
He looked at Imani and, for the first time, wondered what was done in his name.
Chapter 9 โ Wheels Up, Eventually
The aircraft finally pushed back from Gate A17 a little after noon, and by then Imani Brooks no longer entirely believed it was going to.
She had believed it at ten, when the officials' questions ran out and the gate area slowly relaxed its shoulders. She had believed it at eleven, when a fresh crew announcement used the word shortly in a tone she had not heard since early morning. By half past eleven, with the departure board cycling apologetically through times it kept revising, she had settled into a strange, padded calm โ the calm of a person whose day had already contained everything, and who therefore could not be ambushed by mere delay. Somewhere across the country, in Seattle, the National Junior Debate Championship was laying out name cards and water glasses for tomorrow, and she would either be there for it or she would not, and fretting at the glass was not going to move a single aeroplane one inch.
Her father texted: Wheels up yet? She texted: We are a concept, not a flight. His reply โ That's my girl โ made her smile down at her phone in a way she immediately hoped nobody had seen.
When boarding was finally called, it happened all at once and with great ceremony, as if the airline wished to pretend it was a beginning rather than a resumption. Group one. Imani stood, hoisted her teal backpack onto one shoulder, and joined the short line at the reader. The agent scanned her boarding pass โ 2A, window, first โ and looked at it, and then at her, and something small and professional and kind crossed his face.
"Welcome aboard, Miss Brooks," he said, a fraction more formally than the occasion required. "Your seat is ready for you."
The jet bridge smelled of warm rubber and jet fuel and other people's coffee. Halfway down it, Imani stopped being nervous that something else would happen; by the aircraft door, where Kelly Tran waited with her smile rebuilt, she had stopped being nervous at all.
"There she is," Kelly said, and stepped aside like a person opening a door at a ceremony, and Imani went down the short aisle to row 2 and put her backpack under the seat in front of her and sat down in 2A.
The seat was wide and leather and entirely ordinary, and that was the wonder of it. All morning it had been a principle, a paragraph, a line in a record, a thing grown men had moved around screens and cabins โ and now it was simply a seat again, with a window at her left shoulder and the bright Atlanta airfield framed in it, and sitting in it felt less like winning than like a sentence being finished. She buckled her belt. She put her championship folder in the seat pocket where she could see its corner. Outside, a baggage cart trundled past with somebody else's ordinary luggage, and the light came through the window and lay warm across her hands.
Gerald Pierce boarded last of the first-class passengers.
She heard him before she saw him, the change in the air at the door, Kelly's greeting pitched carefully neutral. He came down the aisle with his tablet under his arm and his jacket over his other arm, and he stopped at row 2, and for a moment he stood looking at the seat beside hers โ 2B, aisle, the seat that had had his name on it all along โ with an expression Imani could not quite read and did not try to.
Then he sat down.
He put his tablet away unopened. He buckled his belt without being reminded. He folded his hands in his lap, a big man making himself smaller in a wide seat, and when the safety demonstration began he attended to it with the exaggerated politeness of someone determined to be, for once, entirely unremarkable. He did not speak to her. She did not speak to him. The silence between 2A and 2B was not hostile, exactly โ Imani had sat inside hostile silences; she knew their texture, scratchy and loud. This one was heavier and quieter, like snow. It was the silence of a man with a question he had decided not to ask a fourteen-year-old girl at altitude, and for that decision, alone among the day's events, she found she could almost respect him.
Captain Callaway's voice came over the cabin, unhurried. "Folks, from the flight deck โ thank you for your patience this morning. We're on our way to Seattle. Flight time once we're airborne, four hours and fifty minutes. Smooth ride expected once we're up. Andโ" The pause was so slight that later Imani wondered if she had invented it. "โwe'll get you there."
The engines found their note. The aircraft turned, and turned again, and gathered itself at the end of the runway, and then Atlanta fell away beneath her window in the old, impossible way โ roads shrinking to diagrams, roofs to geometry, the whole complicated ground resolving into distance. Imani pressed her forehead lightly to the cool window, as she had done on every flight since she was small, and watched her city become a map of itself. Somewhere down there was her father's office, and her school, and her bedroom with its wall of debate trophies, all of it perfectly indifferent to the morning, and the indifference felt like kindness.
Hours passed the way hours pass at altitude: suspended, unreal, punctuated by small kindnesses on trolleys. She ate a warm roll and a salad she did not taste. She read her debate notes twice and retained nothing, which had never happened before and which she forgave herself without a fight. In 2B, Pierce slept at last, or convincingly pretended to, his head tipped back and his hands still folded, and sleeping he looked older and less armoured, and she looked away from that, because it felt like seeing something she had not been given permission to see.